The battered but still amazingly unbowed "Community," television's "Brave Little Toaster," returns Thursday night with new show runners and probably one last chance to find a degree of whatever passes for permanence on NBC.

It tells you something about the corporate view of the beloved cult show that NBC sent out press materials for the fourth season a couple of weeks ago that included the information that the season would begin on Oct. 19, 2012.

Wait, what? At first, it looked like some kind of self-spoofing joke on the part of "Community." Would that it were.

The network's crack PR staff hastily sent out an e-mail, saying, in essence, "Oops." Obviously, they'd just dusted off the old press kits from when the fourth season was supposed to have started and popped them in the mail without bothering to fix the premiere date to Feb. 7.

Despite everything NBC has done to thwart the show, intentionally or by accident - including announcing that it would move to Friday nights, then changing its mind, and, oh yeah, canning creator Dan Harmon as the show runner - "Community" enjoys a fiercely loyal following.

The fact that the sitcom doesn't always make linear sense has only further endeared viewers to the group of misfits attending Greendale Community College.

Odd as these oddballs are, they don't hold a sequin to the school's cross-dressing Dean Pelton (Jim Rash).

Thursday's premiere is a crazy, overstuffed jumble of story elements, set in various levels of Abed's consciousness. It's as if the unreconstructed subject of an episode of "Hoarders" were given free rein to write a sitcom script. In many ways, the loopiness of the season opener reflects the peripatetic history of the show itself - almost as if it's one big wink-wink to the audience from new show runners Moses Port and David Guarascio, saying, "Yeah, we know it's been a long, strange trip, but we're going to stick with Harmon's Plan A."

Next week's episode is a little less frenetic, but could have easily come from a Harmon-run season of the past as the gang goes to a "Doctor Who"-like fan convention.

The great British comic actor Matt Lucas ("Little Britain," "The Wind in the Willows") guest-stars as a crazed super-fan, imprisoning Abed in a "Who"-ish TARDIS.

"Community" has always worked because it never plays by any rules, even its own. Fans were rightly worried when Harmon was canned, but at least the first two shows of the new season follow his crazy-quilt template. Let's hope it stays that way.